


The Anatomy of a Tidal Wave

by Cherith



Series: Bring My Soul to Bare [3]
Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types
Genre: F/F, beware the angst, beware the pirates, beware the stormy seas
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-05-09
Updated: 2013-05-11
Packaged: 2017-12-10 23:18:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,827
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/791331
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cherith/pseuds/Cherith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This story has been brewing for a long time.</p><p>Post DA II Isabela prepares to leave Kirkwall and asks Aveline to leave with her, who refuses.  The parting is all sorrow.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to the lovely seimaisin for challenging me to get writing again during the month of May. Without the push, I might not have started working on this again. <3

“Come with me, big girl.”

“No.  I can’t and you know it.”

“A vacation then...  a few days, a week maybe.  Give yourself a break from this.”

“No.”

“Aveline, you are not beholden to this city.  You can leave.  You should leave.  It’s only going to get messier from here.”  Isabela looks at her with as much wide-eyed pleading as she can muster.  “Come with me.”

“I’ve been Guard Captain for 6 years, Isabela, I can’t just leave now.  I made a commitment... I signed up for this.”

“Like hell you did.  You didn't sign up for this mess.”  There was a storm in Isabela’s eyes and Aveline knew if she were a different sort of woman, she might’ve looked away from the treacherous waters she saw in them.  Even still, Aveline blinked.  “There’s a war coming, big girl.  You’re gonna get caught up.”

“I know.”  She shook her head: of course she knew; she was well-enough versed in the signs of war.  Even if Sebastian hadn’t threatened to bring the entire army of Starkhaven down on the city in retribution, Anders’ actions were enough to stir the city to chaos.  If it wasn’t for Isabela, she would’ve been back on the streets, still digging and patrolling.  But the knowledge of the things that were to come didn’t make the city stand still while they waited.  Here, people needed her.  

Isabela sat up, turning away and waving her hands in exasperation.  “Well, I’m leaving.  Me and my ship are getting as far from here as I can get.  I can't be here when people start asking questions.”

With a sigh, Aveline propped her head up, elbow digging into her pillow.  Her other hand traced the scar on Isabela’s thigh, a fingertip along the ridge of the lighter patch of skin that had long since healed, but poorly.

“I know.”

“We helped him,” Isabela whispered.  “We gave him everything he needed.  Hawke…”  Her gaze was lost to some shadow flickering on a nearby wall as she let her thought trail off.   Lips set in a frown, Isabela’s eyes closed.  “Just because you’re the Guard Captain doesn’t mean you’ll  escape questioning when the time comes.  Known.  Associate.  Everyone knows who we are."

"Isabela.  I know."

"Then, come with me.  You always said we could go.  That you wanted to be on the ship for a little while," she turned, looked down at her, cupped Aveline's chin between her thumb and forefinger.  It felt almost motherly, unlike the pirate she knew, she loved.  "We'll swim in the ocean, I'll take you to Rivain -- Ferelden too, if you want."

"No.  And I don’t want to talk about it anymore.  If you’re leaving, we..."  She sat up and wrapped an arm around her pirate’s waist, kissed her shoulder.  Underneath the smell of sex and the rose-scented bath water, Isabela always smelled of the salt, and the sea.  Aveline inhaled; there were few chances left to know that scent and she wanted to remember it.

There was a long silence between them, where sheets ruffled, and long heavy sighs were exchanged.  Aveline watched Isabela's back, how her shoulders tensed, the way her hair shifted with each heavy breath.  Eventually, she found her gaze on Isabela's long neck, naked of her usual adornments.  

“Give me some time.  I’m don’t know that I can leave for good, but in time, I can...”

Isabela turned and kissed her forehead.  “Don’t make promises you won’t keep,” she said.  Her voice was soft, but Aveline heard the bitterness in it.  The anger.  She had a right to be angry.

She wanted to say she meant it.  She wanted to mean it.

Like always, Isabela saw right through her.  


	2. Chapter 2

Aveline bit her lip and swung her legs over Isabela’s side of the bed.  She sat by Isabela; their shoulders touched as they leaned against the other and fell silent once more. Looking down, she studied the freckle pattern on her shoulder, and then her gaze flicked over to study one she knew almost as well on Isabela’s.  Like everything about them, it shouldn’t have fit, shouldn’t have worked: they could both have freckled shoulders but it didn’t make them compatible, or alike.  

And yet, perhaps in a sorrow uniquely created by them, they did.  

Or they had.

If she looked up, and she did, she could sense the fight she hadn’t been invited to in Isabela’s head.  The one she was losing.  If she reached out for her hand, and she did, Isabela only pulled it away again.  And if she leaned in for a kiss, she might have made amends, at least for the night... but she did not.

Isabela would’ve said that she’d be back.  That in a few months, six or more maybe, she’d come back to Kirkwall.  Enough time might’ve passed by then and Aveline could be free to leave, as she wanted to promise.  For all her faults, Isabela rarely lied.  She cheated, and she stole, and she evaded... but if you asked her an honest question you got honesty in return.  

Aveline didn’t wanted honesty tonight.  

“Can we sleep?” she asked at last.  “Can we keep that at least?”

It was her job, not to break.  Let Isabela be angry, Aveline knew she could bear it.  That was her job.  The pirate wench, she got to leave, she could ride the sea from here to Rivain and never come back, free of her at last.  It’s what she’d wanted as soon as Castillion’s boat had come into her hands.  Come with me, she’d asked.  No.  I can’t.  

This was nothing like that.  But her answer was the same and for the life of her, Aveline wished she were the sort of woman that could just... go.

“Sure, big girl,” Isabela said, leaning in and disrupting the balance between them.  She looked over and smiled, and for a moment, Aveline let herself believe that everything was alright between them.  “Anything you want.”

It would’ve been stupid to ask her stay.  Stay.  Don’t go.  I’ll keep you safe.

Anything?

The storm was still there in Isabela’s gaze, all darkness and roiling clouds, and her smile was too wide and full of teeth.  But she could take it for what it was: a reason not to say goodbye, or to make promises they wouldn’t keep.  

“We don’t have to sleep just yet,” she whispered, an offer she rarely knew Isabela to refuse.

“Right you are.”  Isabela leaned in and nipped at ear before whispering, “I might not be able to take you with me in the morning... but I can make you come tonight.”

And with that, it was like someone had swept away the clouds.

It was the sort of horrible line that Isabela would’ve used on her years ago when they’d been drinking too much and Aveline was too tired to walk back to the barracks.  Those days were long gone, and she didn’t prefer them, wouldn’t take them back if it meant not having to watch Isabela leave.  She knew it made her terribly sentimental: to think that she’d rather have the hurt that tomorrow would bring if it meant a pirate in her bed tonight, instead of the time when all she’d done was drown her guilt in honor and memories.

She scooted back onto the bed, beckoned Isabela with a crooked finger, and smiled like there was no tomorrow to consider at all.  Isabela turned, eyebrow cocked to match her sly grin as she crawled closer.  There was little distance to cover between them and yet each movement was both graceful and enticing: a slink in her hips and ready to pounce.

The first kiss, whether it was the first of the day or the first in hours, almost always came with a shock of cold, just below her lips where metal met skin.  Depending on her mood, the second most often came with a nip of teeth on her bottom lip, both playful and possessive.  Tonight there was little other than warmth and hunger in that kiss or the ones that followed.


	3. Chapter 3

Like children, they had fought to stay awake.  Each kiss was a fervent goodbye and even after the room had grown dark and the candles faded, they continued warm and slow and surrounded by the sounds of their own sighs and soft moans. She heard her name over and over from Isabela’s lips in the rhythms of hands and hips, and nimble fingertips.  It was easy to forget the time and the place, for all Aveline knew, she was on a boat set for Rivain.  

Her swarthy captain knew the use of a grin curved like the moon.   Her hands turned the wheel to set them on course, setting her out to sea with the rhythm of the waves.  Isabela had learned the shape of her vessel by heart.  She knew the swell of her thighs in the dark and how to ride the tide of her until there was little left but a soft breeze.

With her captain at the helm, Aveline trusted each stroke of nimble fingers, each crested wave that set fires in her heart.  The stillness between the waves gave her time to navigate the stars behind her eyes.  Years of practice had taught her how to skim the cold waves that caressed her skin.  And when every inch of her was soaked and sea-salted Isabela’s whispers became the lighthouse in the distance, telling her it was safe to come home.

When sleep finally claimed them, Aveline dreamed of dark curls and a throaty laugh and though she never saw her face, she had no doubt about who was at her side.  But in a habit borne of her time with the Isabela, she could not sleep through the night.  It was always the same, no matter what time she’d gone to sleep.  When she woke, the relief of finding Isabela still at her side was cut brief by her need to know what time they had left.  It was early enough, without a peek of sunlight from the arrow slit in far wall where, if this were any sort of decent establishment, there should have been a window.  Isabela had insisted on their together at The Hanged Man; for a pirate, she had a good deal more sentimentality than she liked to let on.

In the dark, she could not watch Isabela sleep but she could feel the rise and fall of each breath under her arm.  With the lightest touch, she could separate blankets from gentle curves.  Wiggling her toes she could feel legs between hers as if even in her sleep she had wrapped around Isabela with no intention of letting go.

There were few things Aveline could think she had ever wanted more than she wanted more than leaving with Isabela when morning came.  In fact, she could count them on a single hand.  And the wanting of them to be different, would never make them any different.

Except this.

Aveline wanted to go, perhaps not more than she’d ever wanted anything in her life, but it was in distinct company.  Her love had been hard won, as had Isabela’s, and it was nothing she so easily gave up.  But like so many things in her life, duty compelled her.  

Staying was the right thing to do.

Even if it hurt.

Until the first cracks for light crept across the room, she watched the dark space where Isabela laid in her arms.  When there was light enough to see she tucked her head down, her nose pressed against the back of Isabela’s neck, closed her eyes, and waited.  Her eyes burned and her body ached and each breath was a yawn in the making, but time marched slowly for them that acknowledged each moment as it passed.

And Aveline wanted to count each one.


	4. Chapter 4

Before Kirkwall, Aveline had been a certain kind of woman.  First and foremost, she had always been a warrior.  She might not have been the knight that her father had wanted her to be, but every knight started somewhere.  Planning to start a life that didn’t include training yards and sword practice and battles and war: she had never imagined it would be for her.  And for the longest time, even after she had met Wesley, it wasn’t.

Then, they got married.  Marriage to a templar required so much work just to get the permission to have the thing done, that submitting to it all gave Aveline plenty of time to think about what it would mean for the rest of her life.  She was still a soldier, being married wasn’t going to change that.  She’d always stood out, she’d borne strange looks and when it was done, being the wife of a templar just meant another thing to bear.  She didn’t have his faith, but she had him and that seemed enough.

They’d fought about it, she and Wesley... having children of their own.  Never for long, never with resolution: there was always something to be done, somewhere to go, a mage to track or a battle to fight.  Nowhere they went was anywhere fit for a child.  Most of the time anywhere one of them had to go the other couldn’t even follow.  That seemed to satisfy the argument, because it couldn’t matter when their lives were barely their own.

And then it hadn’t mattered at all anymore.

Being without him hadn’t changed her mind on the subject either.  Once, Bethany had asked her about Wesley, about how much she missed him.  They were all missing someone.  Or some place.  Missing Wesley, she was used to.  Knowing that he wasn’t anywhere in the world except the dirt where she’d killed him?  She’d never be used to that.  But with time the pain of it lessened.  

She’d tried after that conversation with Bethany to imagine what it would’ve been like to do everything she had done with a child.  Nothing about it made sense.  If they’d had another life to care for, one of the other of them might not have been at Ostagar, or maybe they would’ve both been home, in Lothering.  No variation she could imagine had them living happily together, anywhere.

Seven years later and she had no further insights on what her life could’ve been other than exactly the way it was.  

Kirkwall had changed her.  

Hawke and her family had changed her.

Each of her friends in their own ways, had made her the woman she was proud to be.  That she was comfortable being.  She had learned, in more ways than one and almost always at the insistence of the woman in her arms, how to take pride in who she was.  And how to know exactly what she wanted.

She was proud, and so was Isabela.  Aveline wanted to stay in Kirkwall because it was her home.  It had taken her in and given her a job and a family, and a chance to start over after she’d felt like she’d lost everything good in her life.  Isabela wanted to leave because she knew it was time; Kirkwall had never been her home, only their small family had given her reason to stay.  Leaving or staying was not a matter of which of them could submit, but the confidence in knowing them neither of them could.  

If she fled with Isabela, it would mean submitting to the inevitable war.  It would mean fear: of war, of death, of losing Isabela.  She’d regret it in time, she’d want to ask at every port for news of the city, she’d worry for it’s future and there were few hands she trusted with it.

After all, the two of them had already had more time together than had ever been likely.  It may have take them five years to get there, but the two years since had been two years more than Aveline had ever imagined.  

Isabela curled forward in her sleep, a hand latching on to Aveline’s and pulling it toward her chest.  She leaned in until her lips brushed the base of Isabela’s neck.  She squeezed her fingers and rested a kiss on Isabela’s shoulder.  

“Hmm.  You watching me sleep again, big girl?”  Isabela’s voice was honeyed, slow and muffled by sleep.  

“Through my eyelids, like always.”  

“A likely story.  Scared I’ll steal your coin in the middle of the night?”

“As if you haven’t already,” she said trying to keep the levity in her voice so it didn’t sound like _“only my heart”_.  Or, _“that you’ll leave without saying goodbye.”_  Because she couldn’t be scared.  Especially not about things that were out of her control.. or true already.

She feared not war, or death, or even the loss of the woman she loved.  

Or that’s what she tried to tell herself before either of them admitted that the sunlight was licking at their toes and morning had come.


End file.
